This Memory-Linking Technique Can Help You Remember Anyone's Name

The most effective leaders are the ones who make you feel
like they're really listening. Most importantly, they
always remember names.

So how can you get better at remembering names?

I learned some secrets to remembering names
during my first Dale Carnegie training class
last week (I signed up for the eight-week course after
hearing Warren
Buffet say they "changed [his] life in a big
way"). Carnegie passed away in 1955, but his self-improvement
courses have trained more than eight million
people and are represented in more than 80
countries.

According to my lecturer Bill Lawrence, a lawyer by
day, the best way to remember things is to
think of the things you know about them in a mental picture — the
more exaggerated the image, the easier it is to remember.

This is
particularly useful for names.

Carnegie
writes in his book "Public
Speaking and Influencing Men in Business" that "the secret of a
good memory is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple
associations with every fact we care to retain." Our minds are
essentially "associate machines" and the reason why it's hard to
remember people's names is because there's no meaning behind
their name for the listener.

Carnegie's
memory-linking technique is to picture images that sound like a
person's name — and combine it with other things you know about
them.

If you meet
someone named Laura from Brazil, imagine her with a laurel wreath
on her head swimming in the Amazon River.

Similarly one
can combine these elements in a ridiculous phrase.

To remember that Mr. O.W. Dolittle sells cars for a living, you
can remember the phrase "do little and you won't succeed in
selling cars." For Mr. Thomas Fischer who works in coal, you can
remember the phrase "he fishes for coal orders." If you meet a
scientist name Matt, you can remember him as "the Matt
scientist," which sounds like "the mad scientist."

Although these exercises may sound silly, Carnegie says they are
proven to work.

One of our first exercises in Dale Carnegie's course was to come
up with a story or phrase to help others remember our own names.
One girl's name is Allegra Westin and she asked us to think about
her running with her legs on the West Side Highway. Another guy's
name is Marco Rossi and his story included a red ("Rossi" is
plural for the color red in Italian) arc resembling the letter
"M" (the arc combined with the letter "M" is "Marc-o").

Also, if you don't hear someone say their name
clearly, always ask again.